Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a technique for managing authorities to access a plurality of content items.
Description of the Related Art
In Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-344245, a method is proposed in which an index that manages authority information for respective files is generated, and a display of search results is controlled based on an authority of a search user. Also, in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2008-83961, a method is recited in which authority information is added to keywords, and display of keyword search results and content masking is controlled based on an authority of a search user.
However, in the method recited in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2001-344245, it was only possible to take a form of access control in which access is either permitted or not permitted uniformly for an authority of a user irrespective of the input keyword. Also, in the method recited in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2008-83961, by adding authority information to keywords, not only is access to a file uniformly prohibited, but display is masked from a sentence for only an access prohibited keyword to present to a user. Because of this, access control which presents a sentence in which a prohibited keyword is made to be invisible to a user is realized. However, it was impossible to handle cases in which it is desired that different access authorities be set with respective content items for keywords added to the content.